Cottage Food Law Cake
Cottage Food Law Cake
I designed this eLearning experience for home bakers who are preparing for their first farmer's market and may have some confusion as to what is allowable under the Texas Cottage Food Law.
Embedded Files
Overview
Audience: Home bakers starting their home baking business.
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Visual Design, Storyboarding, Action Mapping.
Tools: Articulate Storyline 360, Powerpoint, Canva, Mindmeister, Adobe XD, and Adobe Illustrator
Problem and Solution
I am an avid hobby baker. I like to make elaborate sugar cookies and macarons. In order to continuously grow and improve with my hobby I belong to many learning communities on the subject. While I bake for fun and for family, many members of these learning communities bake as a job. While there is a short course that is required to bake from your home, I have found that these learning communities are full of people who are confused by what is, and what is not, allowable under their state's cottage food law. Questions on the subject appear, without fail, every day. I thought it would be helpful to have a eLearning course that would reinforce the instruction they are receiving from the state.
For this project I did not work with subject matter experts (SMEs), but instead worked with the end users of the training. I reached out to people in my baking communities who were new to selling from their home and asked them what they had the most confusion on as part of my needs analysis. From there I decided that an scenario based eLearning would be the best choice. Many of the people I spoke with had read the language of the law but weren't entirely sure how it would translate into their daily decision making as they baked. A scenario based eLearning project would give them the opportunity to make decisions in a safe environment with no risk of making someone ill, or getting hit with fines and bad reviews if something they chose was wrong.
Action Mapping
I consulted with several members of several different baking groups to figure out what aspects of the laws were most confusing for them. Additionally, I read through the law myself and highlighted areas I found confusing or worded vaguely. Utilizing their feedback and my own research we were able to create the following action map.
Through the process of creating the action map I was able to outline not only the desired behaviors, but also the possible pitfalls that people can stumble into when preparing to sell their baked goods for the first time. This helped me to focus my eLearning solution on the most common areas of confusion in real world situations.
Text-Based Storyboard
Once the action map was complete I got to work on a text-based storyboard. I wanted to make sure that the eLearning experience told a cohesive narrative while addressing the pitfalls people face when they being selling their home-baked goods. I wanted to make the scenarios as realistic as possible and spoke with my end users again to ask about the sorts of specific scenarios they faced.
I also felt it was important to show the consequences of not following the state cottage law, as some people seemed to think there wouldn't be a problem with ignoring the law. I heard from many people who had faced consequences and wanted to include those instances to make the training more realistic. I asked a few bakers to review the text-based story board and made some changes based on scenarios or consequences they thought were unrealistic.
Visual Mockups
When I was happy with the language in the text-based storyboard I was able to move on to visual mockups. I utilized Adobe XD and Adobe Illustrator to get a sense of what I could achieve visually and to make sure I had a cohesive look.
I created a custom color palette to utilize throughout the project and used similar elements and styles to make the experience fluid and immersive. I hadn't used Adobe Illustrator as extensively in past projects and enjoyed getting the chance to change the colors and mix different elements from different vector images together to create the look I was aiming for. I utilized Adobe XD to play around with the different iterations and decide on the one that felt the most natural and authentic.
Interactive Prototype
I took my mockups and text-based storyboard and used them to begin the creation process in Articulate Storyline 360. I worked on creating the experience through the first scenario and consequences page before sharing what I created with my end users and requesting feedback on the usability and look.
I made a few edits based on their feedback - namely switching some grammar issues that had slipped through and adding a gif of the cake slices coming together to make a whole cake.
Final Development
Once satisfied with the feedback I received on the prototype I worked on developing the remainder of the learning experience. I found for this learning experience that after the initial changes from the prototype there were not any major changes that needed to be made as I went along. My only real change was fixing one of the graphics of the dog where two of his legs blended in with the slide background making it look like he was missing limbs. It was satisfying to have such a smooth final development process. That being said, if I were to do the project over again from scratch I might add more variety in the graphics so she is not standing in her kitchen on quite so many slides.
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